leadership

You can’t delegate encouraging the heart.  Every leader in the organization (every person, in fact) has to take the initiative to recognize individual contributions, celebrate team accomplishments, and create an atmosphere of confidence and support.  It’s not something we should wait around for others to do.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” clearly applies here. The foundation of leadership is credibility.  What is credibility behaviorally?  Over and over again, people tell us credibility is “doing what you say you will do.”  Leaders set the example for others.  They practice what they preach.  If you want others to encourage the heart, you start by modeling it yourself.  Set high standards, believed in others, and invest your attention in them.  You can’t expect others in the organization to follow your lead if you don’t take the first step yourself.

Personal involvement is also a genuine expression of caring.  It helps foster trust and partnership.  Leadership cannot be exercised from a distance.  Leadership is a relationship, and relationships are formed only when people come into contact with each other. 

Effective communication, if you’re serious about it, requires dedication and self-control. Public displays of emotion are not for the fainthearted.  It’s become well known that people are more frightened of public speaking than they are of dying.  Supporting others, particularly in times of great change, can be physically and emotionally draining.  It may seem easy, but we have learned that encouraging the heart is one of the two most difficult of the five practices of exemplary leadership.

We’ve found that it’s much easier for leaders to challenge the process, for example, than it is for them to encourage the heart.  There’s still a lot leaders have to learn.  We begin to see from all this that the main essential of encouraging the heart are core leadership skills.  We are not just about showing people they can win for the sake of making them feel good.  This is a curiously serious business.  When striving to raise quality, recover from disaster, start up a new service, or make dramatic change of any kind, leaders must make sure that people experience in their hearts that what they do matters.

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Most managers unintentionally treat their subordinates in a way that leads to less than desirable performance.  Many leaders have difficulty delegating responsibility.  There seems to be the programmed feeling that the only way to get the job done right is to do it yourself.  While doing it yourself may appear to work, it tends to be a breeding ground for apathy, non-involvement, low motivation, and loss of commitment and enthusiasm.  Sharing the work can be a great motivator, thereby strengthening the organization. 

The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them.  If a manager’s expectations are high, productivity is likely to be high.  If his expectations are low, productivity is likely to be low.  It is as though there is a law that causes an employee’s performance to rise or fall to meet his manager’s expectations.

1. What a manager expects of a subordinate and how he treats the subordinate will combine to profoundly influence the subordinate’s performance and his career progress.  What is critical in the communication of expectations is not what the boss says, but what he does.  Indifference and noncommittal treatment communicate low expectations and lead to inferior performance.  Most managers are more effective in communicating low expectations to their subordinates than in communicating high expectations, even though most managers believe exactly the opposite.

2. Superior managers create high performance expectations that subordinates can fulfill.  Subordinates will not strive for high productivity unless they consider the boss’s high expectations realistic and achievable.  If they are pushed to strive for unattainable goals, they eventually give up trying.  Frustrated, they settle for results that are lower than they are capable of achieving.  The experience of a large printing company demonstrates this.  The company discovered that production actually declined if production quotas were set too high, because the workers simply stopped trying to meet them.  “Dangling the carrot just beyond the donkey’s reach” is not a good motivational device.

3. Less effective managers fail to develop high expectations for their subordinates.  Successful managers have greater confidence than ineffective managers in their ability to develop the talents of subordinates.  The successful manager’s record of achievement and self-confidence grant credibility to his goals.  Thus, subordinates accept his expectations as realistic and try hard to achieve them.

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Integral to the success of delegation is the development of employees’ self- esteem.  The use of self-esteem as a motivator is a recent phenomenon.  In the 1930s the issue was irrelevant.  Back then, the issues were money, security and survival - the very things that were in short supply.  Recent distinct improvements in the satisfaction of these survival needs have brought with them a whole new set of drives.  Workers have begun to complain about a lack of dignity and respect.  With increasing turnover rates, absenteeism and other forms of alienation and dissatisfaction, managers can no longer maintain that workers only care about getting a paycheck.

1. Delegation helps people below you in the organization grow and thereby pushes you even higher in management.  It provides you with more time to take on higher-priority projects.

2. Find out what the talents and interests of your people are and you will be able to delegate more intelligently and effectively.

3. Never underestimate a person’s potential.  Delegate slightly more than what you think the person is capable of handling.  Expect them to succeed, and you will be pleasantly surprised more often than not.

4. Clearly define what outcome is needed, then let individuals use their own creative thinking to determine how to get that outcome.

5. Clearly define the limits of authority that go with the delegated job.  Can the person hire other people to work with them?  What are the spending constraints?

6. Do not avoid delegating something because you cannot give someone the entire project.  Let the person start with a bite-sized piece.  After learning and doing that portion, they can accept larger pieces and areas of responsibility.

7. Clear standards of performance will help the person know when he is doing exactly what is expected.

8. Delegation is taking a risk that the other person might make a mistake.  People learn from mistakes and will be able to do the project correctly the next time.  Where would you be if no one had ever taken a chance on you?

The fact is that management experts and psychologists have shown that a salary increase is not necessarily the ultimate motivator.  Unless you cannot live on your present salary, more money is often a weak incentive.  In addition to providing money to live on, most people work every day to satisfy their need for structure and predictability in their lives.  Look at the endless number of rich men who continue to work every day.  Precisely because their basic needs are being met, workers today do not automatically accept authoritarian, dehumanizing styles of management.

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